Log with Liv

As a child, I used to be greeted by name when I walked into Nichols Library. During summer break each year, I would stroll confidently through the front doors, gripping a tote bag full of completed books with two hands. After returning the previous week’s reads, I would wander the downstairs children’s section. In my memory, I spent no less than hours strolling up and down the aisles, pulling books with compelling titles or particularly colorful covers from the bookshelves surrounding me. Each time I decided on a book to bring home, I would rush over to my summer nanny who could reliably be found sitting at a table reading her latest romance novel. Each week, I would leave the library with five, maybe seven books. Sometimes, when I was feeling particularly indecisive and couldn’t narrow down my options, I would shove ten or twelve books into my bag. After checking out, we headed home where I would run to the empty place on my bookshelf reserved for library books and carefully set out the books I had gotten in the order I wanted to read them. This scene repeated summer after summer.

For most of my life, summers were dominated by books. Hours came and went as I sat curled up in a literal corner, reading. I read feverishly and reverently. I have always been a quick reader, but this was different. It was almost desperate. I would finish a book and then immediately pick up the next one and continue reading. I was completely unaware of the comings and goings around me. My eyes flung from one sentence to the next as I raced through the pages. I was hungry. I had this insatiable desire to read as much as possible. It seemed that this hunger would never be quenched, and for years I read one book after the next in what can only be described as a truly greedy manner. And then, one day, between a new app called Netflix and friends asking me to “hang out” for the day, my hunger was finally satisfied. The pure passion that drove me for years faded away. I couldn’t tell you if this was a slow change, happening gradually as I grew up, or a quick one in which one day I just stopped going back to the library. Nevertheless, something had changed

As much as I loved reading, it paled in comparison to the easy distractions of my LED-studded phone. Why would I look to books as an engrossing escape to the life I knew and was comfortable with, when the apps on my phone could provide the same while also enabling me to not have to think? As obsessed as I was with reading, I became utterly addicted to my phone along with every other teen in the country. I still am.

I often think about how I abandoned my love of reading for such a mind-dulling and unhealthy practice. Even more so, I am ashamed to think about how I let something so important to me completely disappear because I didn’t have enough self-control to limit my phone usage. My biggest problem? I am much too good of a liar. I lie to myself every day that I don’t have time. I have to go to practice, go to work, do my school work, and spend time on college applications. All this being said, each day I rack up an impressive screen time of five or more hours. I’m addicted, for sure, and, quite frankly, angry about it. I’m angry that it is so easy to keep scrolling. I’m frustrated that I spend all my time on social media when I know how it affects me. I know that it negatively impacts my mental health, and yet it is so easy. It is mindless. I don’t remember suddenly losing motivation to think, but the persistent lies I tell myself make it all too easy to endlessly scroll my time away.

Of all the pieces that define me, reading used to be one of the largest. I can’t help but wonder if I walk around now with a book-sized hole carved out of me, an empty space for which I only have myself to blame. If reading was what made me “me” for so long, what does it say about who I am currently that I have completely abandoned a practice that I had once cherished? What other pieces will chip away from me over the years now that I have proven my willingness to abandon the things that quite literally make up who I am?

This is not to say that I never read anymore. I do read, and when I do, my old passion comes rushing back. These days, my old love sustains me just enough to gleefully flip through a book and finish it in one sitting, yet the love generally stops short of compelling me to pick up another book for the next while. I’ll always love to read, that much is for sure. The question then, that remains to be answered, is if this love, my first love, will be able to survive the plentiful distractions flinging themselves at me, vying for my attention and time. 

I can’t easily answer this question. I have before, many times. Usually, the answer is yes. Of course I have enough control over myself to put down a tiny screen and do an activity that gives me joy and benefits my mind. It seems so obvious what the correct course of action is. Other times, when I feel particularly dishonest, I let the lies I tell myself overtake this line of rational thinking and I fall back into the body of a liar as distractions hurl at me. 

In the end, despite which part of me wins out, I will always be the stories I have read. Book-sized hole in me or not, I will always be a reader. Reader, after all, is a term applicable to both past and present tense. If I’m lucky, I’ll honor the “present tense” half of this definition and feel confident using the word once again. There is something so comfortable and alluring about being able to genuinely call myself a reader. Something nostalgic, and even something triumphant. To be able to succinctly say, “this is who I am and what I am made of.” I have struggled, I have lost sight of this at times, but I have always returned. I think this time around, I just might be able to say it honestly.